In the Vindication of the English Constitution he had indeed professed allegiance to the ideal of a balanced constitution, and consequently insisted that the House of Commons alone could not be regarded as the representative of the nation; it was, on the contrary, merely the representative of one estate of the nation, even though that estate might be the most numerous. The ‘people,’ or the ‘nation’ as a whole, was represented only in the three mutually counterbalanced parts of the constitution — the throne, the peers, and the Commons — when taken in conjunction with one another. Disraeli could accordingly proceed to justify extension of the suffrage by maintaining that no increase in the number of voters could ever entitle the House of Commons to regard itself as the true representative of the will of the people. A number of his contemporaries, however, were not slow to point out how unrealistic unrealistic was the assumption that an elected chamber would prove to be as modest as Disraeli hoped it would be about its position in the constitution. Claiming the support of the electorate, it would hardly be likely to accept opposition to its will from the monarch or an hereditary House of Lords as entitled to the same respect as its own wishes. And that, of course, is what subsequently happened: the likelihood of a royal veto on legislative measure supported by the Commons was a remote eventuality by the time Victoria died, and the House of Lords was already on the defensive long before the Liberal onslaught upon it in the first decade of the [20th] century. It was to the idea of a strong popularly-based leadership, then, rather than to the old Burkean ideal of a balanced constitution, that Disraeli’s deeper sentiments and policies actually seemed to point.

That’s from O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, which is pretty good. In a later chapter, he describes the three-way crossroads at which traditionalists and paleos are liable to find themselves:

Let us suppose with Eliot and Dawson that the modern psyche is really rotten to the core, whether because of the decline of religion or culture, or both. In that case, only three responses are possible at the political level. One is despair, which means in practice doing nothing; the second is the advocacy of a spiritual revolution so profound that it is incompatible with a stable version of conservative ideology; whilst the third is a resort to more modest reforms which are bound, however, to appear totally inadequate remedies for the disease they are intended to cure. It is the third solution to which both Eliot and Dawson resort. Eliot writes nostalgically of the parish as an example of what he means by organic community, whilst Dawson suggests that the kind of institution which would satisfy the need for spiritual harmony, supra-political leadership and cultural unity would be one modelled upon the English public school system.

… The real challenge to the imagination of the conservative statesman is to spot those parts of a rickety structure which, when strengthened by modest reforms, will give greater stability to the whole. To attempt more than that — by reforming religion, culture, or men’s beliefs about society and the universe at large, for example — may of course be possible; but the price of success is likely to be the destruction of liberty and legality.

Choosing the right candidate for a particular district doesn’t just mean selecting a generically liberal candidate for a liberal district. Someone like Hoffman was not too “conservative” to win NY-23. But he was too ill-versed in local issues to do himself any good.

Well, I agree that the tale of irreconcilable differences within the GOP is exaggerated, but Cost is dead wrong. The Democrats’ divisions are a source of their strength — that is, they realize that some districts require blue dog candidates, while others will accept staunch liberals — while the GOP’s differences are a source of continued fumbling. Of course you’re going to get a complicated and perhaps immobile legislative performance if you’re bringing into the party all kinds of different interests. But legislating should never be easy (it’s not meant to be), and in partisan politics winning in the first place is the prerequisite to any kind of policy.

The bigger weakness that I see in the GOP isn’t the fractiousness of their primaries or the intractability of their ideological base — the Dems have a lot of that, too — but the demands of the base and the party establishment alike for programmatic conformity. The GOP Congress never gave Bush the trouble that the Democratic Congress is giving Obama. Thus when voters looked at the wreck of the Bush administration, they rightly blamed Republicans everywhere for what Bush had done. Back in their glory days before 1994, congressional Democrats were experts at doing whatever they needed to do to create at least the appearance of putting loyalty to their districts above loyalty to party and president. In practice it was a shame, but they understood what worked. The Republicans, by contrast, have a one-boot-fits-all mentality, both in the primaries and in the legislatures. Republicans who do stick to their own consciences and their districts’ interests, like Ron Paul and Walter Jones, are targets for establishment-backed primary opposition. And of course, Bush strong-armed a great many reluctant Republican congressmen into voting for the prescription drug add-on to Medicare. The GOP demands much more conformity than the Democrats, for whom nonconformity — division — is less of a problem. (Though they certainly do have their sources of bitterness as well, as we saw in the Obama-Clinton contest. But they managed to prevent those tensions from exploding.)

The Republicans could do with a lot more productive dissension within Congress, and less tripping over their own feet in primaries. (For what it’s worth, I have a lot more respect for the Club for Growth model than Daniel Larison does. Conservatives should be content with clobbering liberal Republicans and pushing the party to the Right, even if it takes a longer time to win back power. But they should also be smart enough to reconcile a right-wing program with the diversity of regional cultures. And of course, they ought to wise up about the monstrous foreign policy they’ve been supporting, and the insincerity of movement conservatism’s professions of small-government principle. Antiwar Republicans like Hostettler got clobbered just like pro-war Republicans did in 2006 and 2008, but I suspect that was in part because there were so few antiwar Republicans that the public couldn’t believe such a thing really existed.)

Those things did line up in the Virginia elections. It’s hard to say whether the Old Dominion is a barometer of change or not, though. The commonwealth has been perfectly counter-cyclical since the Carter years, electing Republican governors every time a Democrat is in the White House and Democratic governors every time a Republican is president. There’s a mundane explanation for that, at least going back as far as the Clinton years: Virginia is a divided state where the intensity of either side counts for a great deal. The side that occupies the White House is typically less intense — it’s playing defense — while the anger and energy is on the side of the out party. We saw that in the McDonnell-Deeds gubernatorial contest, and we saw it four years earlier when Democrat Tim Kaine prevailed. The country as a whole, like Virginia, is divided, and the activist energy is very much to the Republicans’ advantage right now. Unfortunately for the GOP, the 2010 elections will be fought district by district and state by state, where local conditions are not always close to those in Virginia or the nation as a whole. Hoffman benefited from the nationwide counter-Obama activist energy, hence the Conservative Party candidate’s great showing for out-of-state fundraising. But local realities trumped that.

The tilt of the playing field in 2010 will favor Republicans, but they still have to play a good enough game to take advantage of it. I do expect them to make gains, but not the huge gains that the base is expecting — not enough to take back either chamber, at least as things stand now. (What happens to the economy over the next year will naturally make a tremendous difference either way.)

New Jersey defied my guess that Corzine would pull through. My prediction was down to the heavily Democratic lean of the state and the tendency of Republican senate and gubernatorial candidates time and again to start strong but ultimately fall short. New Jersey has elected and re-elected plenty of crooked, creepy Democrats before. But Corzine’s luck ran out. I tend to think that the Garden State is less reflective of the direction of the country than Virginia is, however. Certainly Democrats have pulled through in unfavorable conditions there before. The real contest in New Jersey is usually not between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, but between Democrats and their own corruption. The moderate Republican Christie was the “not Corzine” choice.

Her late use of Aristotle was often inaccurate. According to Rand, Aristotle believed that ‘history represents things as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.’ However, as two scholars sympathetic to Rand conclude, this attribution ‘misquotes Aristotle and misrepresents his intent.’ … It appears that Rand drew this concept not from Aristotle, but from Albert Jay Nock. In Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), 191, Nock writes, ‘History, Aristotle says, represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.’ In her copy of the book, Rand marked this apssage with six vertical lines.

For more on Rand and Goddess of the Market, see Justin Raimondo’s review here.

Between being competitive in these races and a rather favorable climate developing for the 2010 midterms, the GOP might seem to have floated out of its doldrums without liquidating its leadership or examining at all seriously what went wrong during the Bush years. But there’s something in the offing that should worry the Republican establishment a bit: the party still looks to have little in the way of a future, with younger Americans leaning heavily Democratic and “liberal.” Where there does seem to be activist energy and passion on the young Right, it’s in the Ron Paul camp, which the GOP still prefers to ignore. A few months ago I took a look at this subject in the mag put out by Young Americans for Liberty. That piece, “The Battle for America’s Youth,” is now online here. The youth vote won’t be a big problem for the GOP in 2010 because chances are very few young people will bother going to the polls. But in the decades to come, the cohort that voted strongly for Obama in 2008 is likely to continue to vote Democratic, which will have larger consequences once they start going to the polls more regularly as they age. The GOP won’t be able to offset that trend by rallying around the dead-end politics of George W. Bush, even repackaged in the shape of Sarah Palin. Any success the party enjoys in the near term only postpones the reckoning that must come.

Recalling the regimes of Walpole, Metternich, Melbourne or Louis Philippe (only more so), with a blend of indifference, benign neglect and a liking for amenities and comforts, the capitalist state must have sufficient hauteur not to want to be bothered by petty disputes among its subjects. The more quietly they get on with their business, the better, and it may occasionally, and a little reluctantly, use a heavy hand to make them do so. Its distance from the mundane concerns of its subjects does not, on the other hand, imply the sort of heroic hauteur which a Nietzsche or a Treitschke wished to find in the state, which reaches out for some high purpose, risking in avoidable war the life and property of the subject; nor the hauteur of utilitarian ethics, which sees the subject and his property as legitimate means to a greater common good. In a seeming paradox, the capitalist state is aristocratic because remote, yet with enough bourgeois overtones to recall the governments of the July Monarchy of 1830-48 in France. At any event, it is a state which is very unlikely to be a republic.

All this criticism of republicanism, by the way, should not be taken to mean that I don’t appreciate Jefferson, or even Machiavelli. Neither republicanism nor democracy is exactly the right term for the thing at which I’m taking aim — it’s more basically the idea that man creates his own law and that politics should should express human will. To some extent, politics as what Oakeshott called “enterprise association” or “teleocracy” is unavoidable. But that’s something to be discouraged as much as possible, and some political arrangements and philosophies encourage teleocracy more than others. The great merit of the U.S. Constitution, for all that it centralized and expanded power, is that it’s nonetheless nomocratic and can be used to thwart teleocratic drives.

You can see from this passage in Corey Robin’s review some of the intriguing avenues for Hobbes research:

And that, in Skinner’s suspenseful retelling of how Hobbes came to this understanding of freedom, is the purpose of Hobbes’s effort: to separate the status of our personal liberty from the state of public affairs. Freedom is dependent on the presence of government but not on the form that government takes; whether we live under a king, a republic or a democracy does not change the quantity or quality of the freedom we enjoy. This separation had the dramatic effect of making freedom seem both less present and more present under a king than Hobbes’s republican and royalist antagonists had allowed.

… it’s also clear from Hobbes and Republican Liberty and Skinner’s other writings that he believes the Hobbesian view of liberty has persisted in the writings of Constant, Isaiah Berlin and the tradition of what is now called negative or minimal liberalism. Unlike the robust liberalism of John Dewey, which suggests that anything less than complete democracy in the public and private spheres poses a threat to individual freedom, negative liberalism focuses on a narrower range of abridgments: being “prevented by other persons from doing what I want,” as Berlin puts it, when there is “deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act.” Freedom, to Berlin, is the absence of interference, and, in a nod to Hobbes, he writes that it “is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government.”

Skinner also has suggested that the republican account of liberty has lived on in the democratic movements of the nineteenth century, the Marxist critique of wage slavery, feminism and “other pleas on behalf of the dependent and oppressed.” Where the negative liberal believes that the state should ensure “that its citizens do not suffer any unjust or unnecessary interference in the pursuit of their chosen goals”–most notably at the hands of the state–the radical, writes Skinner, “maintains that this can never be sufficient.” The state must also “liberate its citizens from…personal exploitation and dependence.”

…If we read Skinner’s footnotes more carefully, we see that the Hobbesian spirit also haunts the contemporary right. Hobbes’s idea of freedom pervades libertarian discourse, and Leviathan casts a long shadow over the conservative vision of a night watchman state–where the government’s primary purpose is to protect the citizenry from foreign attack and criminal trespass; where people are free to go about their business so long as they do not interfere with the movements of others; where contracts are enforced and security is ensured.

Hobbes as liberal, or even libertarian, is not a new idea. If anything, it has become conventional wisdom on the Left (thanks to C.B. Macpherson) and the Right (thanks to Leo Strauss). But there are still angles to be explored, and I’m less interested in Hobbes as authoritarian liberal than in Hobbes as critic of republican-democratic power.

Professor Robin tries to embarrass libertarians by dredging up Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek’s association with Augusto Pinochet as an example of Hobbes in action. But ask yourself this question: bloody as Pinochet’s repressions were, were they bloodier than a republican/democratic civil war or revolution would have been? That’s Hobbes’s test. Lately I’ve been thinking about the philosophical connection between conservatism and peace, and questions about authority, power, liberty, civil war, and peace always seem to involve Hobbes, no matter how un-Hobbesian a point one starts from. But again, I don’t see all of this as a sign that Hobbes’s Leviathan is a friend of liberty, rather I’m led to the negative point that radical democrats/republicans are potentially the most murderous and illiberal bunch of all. You can see a bit of that in “Every Man a God-King.”